Weyburn

“ Lord Ormont was discoursing with racy eloquence of our hold on India: his views in which respect were those of Cuper's boys. Weyburn ventured a dot-running description of the famous ride, and out flew an English soldier's grievance. But was not the unjustly-treated great soldier well rewarded, whatever the snubs and the bitterness, with these large dark eyes in his house, for his own? Eyes like these are the beginning of a young man's world; they nerve, inspire, arm him, colour his life; he would labour, fight, die for them. It seemed to Weyburn a blessedness even to behold them. ”

“ Some one must go to him immediately. This other woman who said he loved her——
“What's the matter, Cynthia? Are you ill?” she heard Weyburn's voice remotely asking.
“I'm afraid there has been an accident,” she said. “I want you and Miss—this lady to go at once to Professor Casley's rooms, wherever they are, and see how he is. I'm afraid he may have killed himself.”
“Not a chance,” said Weyburn. “A man just engaged to you, my dear, might commit a good many follies, but suicide would not be one.”
Cynthia felt a growing weakness of body, but her will was strong. ”

“ One has to sound it loudly; there is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and blood, with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn was Cuper's Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to raise emotion, loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech—always excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline, the address of a General, Athenian or other, to troops. ”

“ The thinking of the lesson to Morsfield on the one hand, and of the slow-and-sure postillion Joshua Abriett on the other, lulled Lord Ormont to a short repose in his desolate house. Of Weyburn he had a glancing thought, that the young man would be a good dog to guard the countess from a mad dog, as he had reckoned in commissioning him. ”

“ Cynthia, unsuspected by any but a few intimate friends, had a secret passion for culture. This part was exactly the sort of part she had dreamed of playing, and she knew now that the play couldn't last a week. Even Weyburn, the most generous of producers, couldn't keep such an expensive production playing to empty houses—and they would be empty. She was largely responsible for Weyburn having put it on, for she had fallen in love with it when she first read it. ”

“ Somebody has said that the keenest pleasure in life is the pleasure of absolute possession. I own you, Bertie Weyburn, body and soul, and you know it. If you were a big enough man, you'd kill me: if you were big enough in another way, you'd defy me and take what is coming to you. ”

“ Fancy people feeling like that about death—to sleep, no more! In a drawer of his desk he had an instantaneous poison obtained some years before from an unsuspecting professor of chemistry. How very simple and pleasant and peaceful the idea was! It was perhaps a little unjust to Weyburn, poor fellow; but he was quite capable of cutting out an hour. Then probably the publicity of his suicide would give the play a new lease of life. Perhaps Weyburn might even get his money back. Grimes, the publicity man, would be delighted. ”

“ Lady Charlotte's breath had withered the aspect of Aminta's fortunes. Weyburn could forgive her, for he was beginning to understand her. He could not pardon 'her brother Rowsley,' who loomed in his mind incomprehensible, and therefore black. Once he had thought the great General a great man. He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler playing his cleverly-hooked fish for pastime.
What could be the meaning of Lady Charlotte's 'that, man Morsfield, who boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped'? ”

“ The street was a banishment and a relief when Weyburn's first interview with Lord Ormont was over.
He rejoiced to tell his previous anticipations that he had not been disappointed; and he bade hero-worshippers expect no gilded figure. We gather heroes as we go, if we are among the growing: our constancy is shown in the not discarding of our old ones. He held to his earlier hero, though he had seen him, and though he could fancy he saw round him. ”

“ You are so independent and know just how to do things." Now that Mary had suggested it, it met with Nettie Weyburn's placid approval. Cecil Ferris echoed it. She, too, had fallen under the spell of Evelyn's beauty.
"I must run along or be late to chapel," murmured Evelyn modestly, and hurried off at precisely the wisest moment to further her own cause. The ambition to become the president of the proposed club had sprung into life in her self-centered young soul as she stood reading the bulletin, and she determined that she would leave nothing undone to obtain the honor. ”

“ Matthew Weyburn, the fencer, boxer, cricketer, hunter, all things manly, rather shrank from firearms—at least, one saw him put on a screw to manipulate them. In danger—among brigands or mutineers, for example—she could stand by him and prove herself his mate. Intellectually, morally, she had to bow humbly. Nor had she, nor could she do more than lean on and catch example from his prompt spiritual valiancy. It shone out from him, and a crisis fulfilled the promise. Who could be his mate for cheerful courage, for skill, the ready mind, easy adroitness, and for self-command? ”

“ Love and death might be floating about him, but to Weyburn the play was the priceless thing, the great climax and interpretation of life. He was alive with electric energy.
“Here, Grimes,” he said, “get this to the typewriter and have her type the parts, and take one yourself to Derham. It's all new for him—and for Cynthia. Not so much for the others, fortunately. If she knew it we could put it on to-night. We can try anyhow. Get along, Grimes.” He himself moved to the door. “At three, Cynthia,” he said.
“No, not at three,” said Casley. ”

“ Nettie Weyburn had won the vice-presidency, Cecil Ferris had been chosen secretary, while quiet little Mary Reynolds had been made treasurer. The reading of each name elicited its quota of applause, but it was plain that, of the four officers, Evelyn was, by far, the greatest favorite. After appointing a committee of four girls to assist her in drawing up the constitution and by-laws, Grace said pleasantly: "Will the new officers please come forward so that we can all see you. You must be formally introduced, you know." ”

“ Pay-day came at the end of the week, and when the envelopes had been given out the mill foreman took me aside.
"I'm sorry, Weyburn," he began curtly, "but I'm afraid you'll have to be moving on. Personally, I don't care, one way or the other, what you've been or where you hall from. You do your work well, and that's all I ask of any man. But your story has got out among the hands, and that settles it. They won't work with a convict." ”

“ His clear, unegotistical mind saw that it was not a good play. Nevertheless he had sent it off to Wilfred Weyburn, the most likely of any of the producers to accept it; and it had been accepted. No one was more surprised than Casley. It was characteristic of him that he mentioned the whole incident to nobody, and the first knowledge that came to the faculty and president of Boonton College was when a picture of Casley in cap and gown, walking beside a police dog, appeared in the Sunday papers, with a flattering caption about the youthful professor and his favorite pet and his new play. ”

“ Love told them both that they were trembling into one another's arms, not voluntarily, against the will with each of them; they knew it would be for life; and Aminta's shamed reserves were matched to make an obstacle by his consideration for her good name and her station, for his own claim to honest citizenship also.
Weyburn acted on his instinct at sight of the postillion and the chariot; he flung the window wide and shouted. Then he said, 'It is decided,' and he felt the rightness of the decision, like a man who has given a condemned limb to the surgeon. ”

“ It was high drill with all of Lord Ormont's books, and there was not a modern or a minor name among the regiments. They smelt strongly of the bookseller's lump lots by order; but if a show soldiery, they were not a sham, like a certain row of venerably-titled backs, that Lady Charlotte, without scruple, left standing to blow an ecclesiastical trumpet of empty contents; any one might have his battle of brains with them, for the twining of an absent key.
The door opened. Weyburn bowed to his old star in human shape: a grey head on square shoulders, filling the doorway. ”

“ It was wonderful, too, the amount of hitherto undiscovered ability which came to light at the call for service, and it was not long before Nettie Weyburn had acquired considerable reputation as a manicurist, while Ethel Hilton gained lasting laurels as a hair dresser and Mary Reynolds proved herself a competent tutor. Hilda Moore became a fad among certain girls who loathed letter writing and willingly paid her for taking their dictation and typing their home letters, while Cecil Ferris stood alone as an expert mender of silk stockings. Louise Sampson made silk blouses. ”

“ Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't—to use the old schoolboy words—take a licking!
These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of which they were the sign. ”

“ We slept at Ashead, two hours from Steignton. He and a friend accompanied us, not with my consent. Lord Ormont could not have been aware of that. These accidental circumstances happen. There may be pardonable intentions on all sides.'
She smiled. Her looks were open, and her voice light and spirited; though the natural dark rose-glow was absent from her olive cheeks.
Weyburn puzzled over the mystery of so volatile a treatment of a serious matter, on the part of a woman whose feelings he had reason to know were quick and deep. She might be acting, as women so cleverly do. ”

“ To meet a married woman, and be mooning over her because she gave him her eyes and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to rouse an honest fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of his intermediate amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable passion after Browny sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His first love was his only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly humiliating to recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then, by right of his passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny belonged, to Matey Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. ”

“ Can a country treating a good soldier—not serving it for pay—in so scurvy a fashion, be struck too hard with our disdain? One cannot tell it in too plain a language how one despises its laws, its moralities, its sham of society. The Club, some choice anecdotists, two or three listeners to his dolences clothed as diatribes; a rubber, and the sight of his girl at home, composed, with a week's shooting now and then, his round of life now that she refused to travel. What a life for a soldier in his vigour. Weyburn was honoured by the earl's company on the walk to Chiallo's. ”

“ A general giggle went the round of the sextette.
“Not with my everyday ordinary ears, my202 child,” answered Emma, quite undisturbed. “It is that inner voice of duty that is making all the commotion. I would much rather bask in the light of your collected countenances than listen to those frenzied shrieks. But what of my trusting classes, who delight in writing themes and passing them on to me to be corrected?”
“Oh, yes; we all delight in writing themes,” jeered Nettie Weyburn, to whom theme writing was an irksome task. ”

“ The photograph was years old and the dog belonged to one of the students—who was suspended subsequently because the dog attacked the night watchman—but the publicity of the Weyburn office was not famed for its accuracy so much as for its continuity and grace.
The president, meeting him the next morning on the campus, called out jovially—for the modern president likes to think he has a variety of creatures in his faculty, “What's this, Casley? ”

“ Another horse was being led up and down by Louis, and, alas, my heart winced at the sight. For it bore a lady’s saddle, and I saw that we were to have company. Was it Madame who meant to come with us? or Mademoiselle? And how far? To Auch? or farther?
I suppose that they had set some kind of a watch on me; for, as I walked up, M. de Cocheforêt and his sister came out of the house—he looking white, with bright eyes, and a twitching visible in his cheek, though he still affected a jaunty bearing; she wearing a black mask.
‘Mademoiselle accompanies us?’ I said formally. ”

“ We were within a hundred paces of the top and the finger-post. She cried out wildly that she did not understand. ‘What is it you—you—have just said?’ she murmured. ‘I cannot hear.’ And she began to fumble with the ribbon of her mask.
‘Only this, Mademoiselle,’ I answered gently. ‘I give your brother back his word, his parole. From this moment he is free to go whither he pleases. Here, where we stand, four roads meet. That to the right goes to Montauban, where you have doubtless friends, and can lie hid for a time. Or that to the left leads to Bordeaux, where you can take ship if you please. ”